In recent years, travel between countries for both business and pleasure has increased dramatically. One difficulty associated with intercountry travel (which also forms an impediment to increasing such travel) is the language barrier. More specifically, the countries of the world are inhabited by people who speak a wide variety of different languages and dialects, only a few of which are understood by even the most sophisticated traveler. The difficulties associated with reading documents in a foreign language, and conversing with another who does not understand the speaker's language and whose language the speaker does not understand, creates the language barrier referred to above.
As computer systems have gained in power, as a result of increases in processing speed and memory capacity, more attention has been given to using computers to translate written words from one language to another. Unfortunately, while some notable success has been achieved in this area, little attention has been given to the use of computers for voice translation, i.e., to translate words spoken in one language to spoken words in another language. As a result, travelers have been forced to continue to rely on a language dictionary or foreign phrase book. While convenient from a size point of view, language dictionaries and foreign phrase books are extremely difficult and time consuming to use, and require both memorization and annunciation skills. The present invention is directed to overcoming the foregoing and other problems associated with translating spoken words from one language to another. More specifically, the invention is directed to providing a voice language translator suitable for implementation in hand-held size that rapidly and accurately translates words spoken by a user in one language to spoken words in another language.